Balamory does Goodfellas at Holyrood as deal falls apart
THE attempt – by Humza Yousaf and the cast of In The Night Garden who appear to constitute the parliamentary membership of the Scottish Green Party – to surgically attach a--- to elbow, collapsed yesterday.
The First Minister announced the end of the Snp-green coalition in an impromptu press conference and, as the recently dumped often are, they were incandescent. Iggle Piggle and friends soon delivered a statement of their own, claiming that being deprived of ministerial cars was a huge blow for a greener Scotland.
“Future generations have been betrayed,” grumbled Lorna Slater, the Green’s co-leader. She mourned the progressive policies that might have been in the Snp-green utopia – rent controls, free muesli, a tax on thinking about owning a home, gender reassignment for cats. Her colleagues scowled into their rainbow lanyards.
Unsurprisingly, First Minister’s Questions was all glowering and tension and vague threats: Balamory does Goodfellas. The Scottish Parliament camera operator made sure to zoom in on the Green delegation’s reactions throughout. There they were, the ghosts at the feast: if the feast was the kids’ corner at a Frankie and Benny’s and the ghosts were deceased members of the Muppet Show.
Douglas Ross, the Scots Tory leader, reminded Mr Yousaf that just this week he had said the agreement was “worth its weight in gold”. Worth its weight in turd might have been more accurate. Mr Ross pledged to lodge a vote of no-confidence in the First Minister.
Mr Yousaf pointed out that the Tory Party did a good line in chaos themselves. Not an unfair point: but the Tories do at least manage to keep their cock-ups in-house, rather than outsourcing them to a party whose manifesto reads like a one-off collaboration between Mr Tumble and Chairman Mao. It wasn’t just the Tories who gave Mr Yousaf a barracking. Anas Sanwar, the Scots Labour leader, skewered him as weak, while Alex Cole-hamilton, the Lib Dem spokesman, branded the Greens and SNP “clowns”. The presiding officer called him up on this. Cole-hamilton apologised, presumably to the clowning community, for associating them with such ridiculous people.
By this point, we weren’t really at First Minister’s Questions anymore. It felt more like a hazing ritual at a particularly feral American frat-house – with Yousaf the unfortunate pledge.
Eventually, it was the Greens’ turn to wield the paddle. “Who does the First Minister think he has pleased most today?” asked Patrick Harvie. “Douglas Ross, Fergus Ewing or Alex Salmond? And more to the point, which of them does he think he can rely on for a majority in parliament now?” Ouch. Somehow, in the rancorous world of Scottish politics, Mr Yousaf had achieved the unimaginable. He’d managed to unite just about everyone.
‘We weren’t at FMQS anymore. It felt more like a hazing ritual at a feral American frat-house’